Legoland, fasting and the heat

 An update on things and why I stopped posting so much.

I have not been posting much, well at all over the last few months. I have had an interview at work for a promotion of sorts and this took priority of pretty much any spare time I had and that doesn’t take into account spending time with my family.

I have kept on running and at least maintained OMAD even though the alternate day fasting has taken a step back in the heat and with trips to Legoland meant that staying healthy whilst spending all day in 40 degree heat. I think one of the top considerations when performing fasting is to not be too strict but at the same time don’t flake out too easy.

I think I heard that you should try and stick to things 100% of the time but if you manage 80-90% of the time then that is a success. So mentally I am not beating myself up over not sticking to alternate day fasting, my weight has crept up a little but it is the summer and I am eating fruit, so I am hoping worst case that my urges for this will shift to lower carb alternatives as the weather starts to cool. At the same time one of the things I am enjoying with Keto IF over Keto is that I am not so strict with the Keto, in fact it is more Paleo than Keto.

I am hoping to get back to posting once or twice a month, hopefully with some more details on running style and analysis of gait from myself on the treadmill in different shoes. This should tie in nicely with my club where we might be looking to give better access to this kind of training.

Another week of fasting, running and weight loss

Another week of alternate day fasting and running and I am starting to get my mojo back. Things have not been great over the past 2 weeks, my weight has not really moved much and my 5k time trial did not go as hoped. At the same time I have made some good progress with my running motivation and am back into the swing of it. My goals have changed from doing the 5k training plan to building my base.

I mean really building my base should always have been my aim but I really wanted to speed up, then again building you base can speed you up. I am back to 2lbs away from being a healthy BMI as well and longer slower running should help with this. 

Wow this post is all over the place. Anyway my primary reason for shifting back to longer slower running is the heat but also that fast running doesn't work great with fasting (at this point). If you run hard before you eat you are feeling quite depleted and the act of running fast makes you deplete glycogen stores and then it is harder to stay fasted as this increased your hunger. 

Overall I am further ahead of where I was in 2015 in terms of weight loss and on a par with my fast running pace. I am currently on a run steak of 6 days running at least 20 minutes, though with 2 10 mile runs in there as well I feel it was a productive week. 

Now my plan to to keep my run streak of at least 20 minutes a day going for as long as I am healthy to do so but with the aim of increase my miles. Next week I will aim for 3 10 mile runs, which will be helped by England Athletics advising that running clubs can start again. So hopefully next week I can do 3 x 10 miles runs on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (always helps with the Saturday morning weight in) and then do at least 20 minutes on the other days. Will aim to build this up to more and more days a week, with lots of recovery chucked in of course and hopefully by the time I am back in the office I will have done my highest ever mileage week. 

Ahead of 2015 me

Another week and another great result for weight loss, 2.4lbs down this week which takes me ahead of 2015 me by a whooping 0.2lbs. Given the challenges at the moment I am really happy that the weight is still coming off nicely. 

Fasting this week was tough, I tried to go for my longest ever fast and did just about manage it. Having hoped to go from Monday to Saturday fasting I ended up having a 2 hours eating window on Thursday because I was feeling very lightheaded. 

This week I have also had a look at some photos of myself, not ready to post them yet, but I am happy with the change I have been able to see since the photo I took at the end of week 1. At the moment my typical week looks something like. 

At the moment I feel like this is a sustainable effort to achieve my weight loss target at which point I can introduce some more running and some more eating! 

Week 5

So I have not really been motivated to post on here much, I mean I didn't really expect any views and this is mostly just for me to document my progress so going forwards when I am bound to gain weight again (or maybe not if this works as I hope) I know how to get back to where I want to be. 

This week was another good week, I lost about 2.5lbs and am back on course with where I was in 2015. As I have said before and as the graph below shows (at least at the time of publishing as it should live update), it was around this point in 2015 that the weight loss began to stall. Up to this point I had lost 85lbs, in the next 7 weeks I would lose another 10lbs (under 1.5lbs a week compared to 85lbs in 20 weeks). In the weeks that followed I had a net change of nothing in 9 weeks. Although it is not a race against 2015 I would like to get ahead of it because I am a competitive person. Now the thing is that I am not looking just to be lighter, mostly I am looking to be healthier. 

I am not 100% sure how to judge the healthier, having been keto and sometimes carnivore for 6 years and now with fasting I probably am healthier so I might try and take a look at fitness. In 2015 I ran a 5k (probably 3 miles but not sure) on the 31st May in 23:04. Now to me that seems slow, bearing in mind I have run low 19 minutes (though not sub 20 since 2016). I did run sub 21 last year but at the time was marathon training and running consistently and 10lbs lighter than I am now. Think I will do another post on some running goals for me. 

Still a bit more weight lost this week and runnong on my fasted days has felt good. 

Fasting Types - Alternate Day Fasting

I am kind of winging it with my fasting at the moment, I am listening to my body (and books by Jason Fung) however there are lots of different ways that people fast, you can try the different methods to see what works for you. Today I want to take a look at alternate day fasting. This type of fasting gained enough hype that the NHS even did an article on it. Think is was mainly to stop people from jumping in but interesting nonetheless.  

The concept it pretty simple, you eat every other day. You could do this literally or fast on Tuesday, Thursdays and Saturdays. In some ways I like this over the idea of the daily 16:8 or 20:4 fasts because (as I am sure I will cover) there are advantages for the more extended fasts. In this example if you maintained some sort of eating window on the eating days, finishing at say 6pm then fast a day and start eating at 10am the next day you have managed a fast of  6 hours + 24 hours + 10 hours 40 hours. 

Another advantage for this style of fasting is, if you like socialising, you can still go out with your friends on a Friday night or if like me you like running but don't fancy running at the end of a day with no eating then you can pick the days you are running / going out to match the days you are eating. 

I found one good story on YouTube which I have embedded below, she explains her 2 year development and weight loss using this style of fasting. Clearly this is a popular topic the the video having had over 1 million views and 50,000 likes. 

Annoyingly the article linked to in the NHS report mentioned above is not, as suggested, freely accessible but cost a shed load of money. As a result I can't actually look into it but the analysis done by the NHS is pretty good. 

There are some freely available papers that you can access such as this one and this one. I think it is interesting that the one on healthy individuals suggests hunger on fasting days does not decrease but I didn't see any mention of this on the obesity paper. I think the diet used on the non-fasting days could be key as a keto diet is much less likely to lead to lots of hunger. 

I will certainly be able to report back on how I feel in the following sates after running: 

1) After the slightly bigger feed on the feeding days. 

2) After running on the end of the fasting day

3) Running in the morning of the feeding day but before breaking the fast. 

Be interesting to compare how I feel on these runs. 

I think that is all. Enjoy.